From the podcast: Daggett Morse of Xaverian on next steps

On the latest episode of the "Chasing The Goal" podcast, Xaverian (Mass.) head coach Daggett Morse joined the guys in the studio.

On this week’s episode of New England Lacrosse Journal’s “Chasing The Goal” podcast, hosts Kyle Devitte and Jack Piatelli were joined by Xaverian (Mass.) head coach Daggett Morse.

Morse (Needham, Mass.) played his high school lacrosse at Central Catholic (Mass.). After graduation, he went on to play as a midfielder for Hartwick College and then came back to Massachusetts to begin his coaching tenure with Medfield High School.

As the Warriors’ defensive coordinator, Morse helped Medfield win three straight MIAA Division 2 championships from 2014-16. Since 2015, Morse has also worked with Laxachusetts and the NLF as a club coach.

In September 2019, Morse was hired to succeed Tim Gardner at Xaverian. In his two full seasons at the school, Morse has an overall record of 20-16, including a 13-8 season last year.

Six juniors on Xaverian have committed to play for D-1 teams. Is this the year that the Hawks finally get past St. John’s Prep and BC High? Morse takes that question and more.

Watch the full podcast below on YouTube. It’s also available on all major podcast platforms. If you enjoy it, please leave a rating and a review. Watch more episodes on the Chasing the Goal podcast channel.

Here are some excerpts from the pod.

Kyle Devitte: How has the process of becoming a head coach been for you after being an assistant at Medfield for so long? 

Daggett Morse: I don’t know what’s in the water at Medfield, but 40 kids show up and they’re all good, so that was easy. A little bit more involved, obviously, on that side of things. 

We don’t reach out proactively. That’s against the rules and we absolutely play by the rules. It’s easy enough to do it. The problem is there are too many kids sometimes, where someone might come late and be a good player. You may have like 50 kids waiting in front of you. 

KD: What is your expectation for the season? 

DM: Those are always tough because you can’t write “championship” on a whiteboard. It’s too nebulous of an idea to be a realistic goal. So we really just focus on the small building blocks. Are we better this Monday than we were last Monday? And I don’t know. Better at what? Maybe it’s, we fix the clear this week. Something tangible we can all grab onto because it’s a long season. And if all that’s up there is the end result … it never comes together as well as it should. So, it’s tough.

It’s almost like being a teacher with the kind of scope and sequence, where you have to look at like every individual week as a unit. But also you actually have to plan and put all these things in and sometimes pull yourself back. You’re like, “I can’t install six offenses. That’s not going to work.” So, our expectation is just to improve, just to get better. I think we’re all thinking we’d like to take it a round further (in the MIAA Division 1 playoffs). We went down to Hingham — a phenomenal team — in the round of eight and fell short. There was no shame in that; we lost to a better team. So, I think we’d like to go further than that. But it’s a long way to go to make it happen.

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